


Cambridge 1902

by nimblermortal



Category: Leviathan - Scott Westerfeld
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 20:24:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2745785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eighteen months after the launch of the first German zeppelin, the British government is making a terrible mistake in their rush to launch a competing airship: they aren't hiring Emmy Darwin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cambridge 1902

**Author's Note:**

  * For [krityan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/krityan/gifts).



Father was personal friends with Dr. Bateson. Dr. Bateson was a floral boffin but had been called in, as nearly all of them had, to work on the Big Project, as he was far from hesitant to remind them. Top secret, of course, and if Emmy had not had plans, she would have been bored to tears by all the talk of what Dr. Bateson couldn’t talk about.

“It’s an airbag, isn’t it?”she asked instead, leaning over her plate at dinner. “To rival the one the Germans let off in Berlin two years ago?”

“Eighteen months,” Dr. Bateson said stiffly, as if arguing about the time would distract Emmy from the knowledge that she was correct.

“Yes, of course,” Emmy said, pretending to be chastened, and busied herself with knife and fork. “But it is an airbag, isn’t it?”

Dr. Bateson, who had been all too happy to hint about the Big Project only moments before, shifted in his seat and looked uncomfortable. No one else knew quite what to do - except, perhaps, Emmy’s father. Emmy carefully did not look at him as she finished her bite, letting them all stew as she carefully, punctiliously masticated and wiped her mouth.

“It must be terribly difficult to feed,” she said. “A beast that big traveling that far, and who knows what foreign things might be considered food? One shudders to think what that would do to such a necessarily fragile digestion.”

“My Emmy,” her father put in, “is terribly clever. You must excuse her.” He did not sound as if he thought there were anything to excuse - and well he oughtn’t, since he had been training her in the study of life ever since Raz had thrown down his books and declared he was going to be a mathematician, that he’d turn clanker before he’d read one more book about life chains.

“You ought to be more careful about who you’re ‘terribly clever’ in front of,” said Dr. Bateson.

“Of course,” said Emmy, wondering just how clever he expected her to be; she had waited until they sent Dr. Bateson’s boys to bed, and if she waited any longer they would try to send her off as well. “It’s just a terribly exciting problem, and I’m afraid in my eagerness to apply my studies I forgot myself.”

She was about to imply that, given something to work on, she would be much less likely to accidentally divulge state secrets when Dr. Bateson said, “Your studies?”

“I’ve been teaching Emmy about the life sciences since she was quite young,” said her father, who seemed not to realize that Emmy could handle this herself.

“My Mendel trees have been quite a success - growing bigger, softer almonds for marchpane production, you see. I used my grandfather’s personal works as a guide, alongside modern literature of course. Actually,” she added as if just thinking of it, “his work on bees -“

“You say you’ve already done practical work?” Dr. Bateson asked, before she could explain how the bees would fit into the airbag’s life cycle.

“Very crude things,” Emmy admitted. “Just the Mendel trees.” The idea had come from her sister Ruth; it was Raz’s idea to make the name a pun on the clanker word for almond*. Raz had a lot of respect for clankers.

“That was quite industrious of you,” said Dr. Bateson. “I should like to have a talk with you about just how you managed it.”

“That would be lovely,” said Emmy. “How about tomorrow?”

 

Once she had gotten into Dr. Bateson’s lab, of course - and once Emmy had gasped with only a little more than her predicted, allotted quantity of ardor over his microscopes - it was not difficult to persuade him she was the exact person he needed about to consult for his work on how best to feed the beast. Emmy’s father, who had figured out what she was up to at dinner the night before, had spent the afternoon with Mrs. Bateson arranging the logistics for Emmy to spend the term as their lodger, so that when the subject was broached with Dr. Bateson, it was already practically accomplished.

The boys had to be moved into the same room, which hurt John’s feelings terribly, though Martin was not old enough to be concerned. John was consoled by promises that Emmy would play with him, which were shortly altered to promises that Emmy would _not_ play with him when her childrearing abilities were discovered. That left Emmy free to play in the lab.

And what a lab. She could and did spend all day running from one test tube to the next, determined to prove she was worth the exceptions made in her honor - the sudden accommodations, the breach of national security, the propped-open lab door. She had arranged them all, and she had no regrets, and she was determined that no one else would have them either.

For three weeks, the novelty of the lab was enough, the thrill of getting to mix her own life chains, zipping and unzipping them in the clanker flasks where she could swirl chemicals about without ever catching sight of the tiny chains, though she could look at them if she wanted. She fell into bed at night dreaming of sequences and ways to replicate them, insert them in between links of preexisting code, and dreamed the strangest dreams that, upon waking, seemed to be absolutely integral for the work she was doing, if she could just remember them.

After three weeks, it began to rankle that Emmy was not allowed into the plant where they kept the creature she was designing. Creatures, rather; the first few beasties of any fabrication rarely survived.

And then there were Sundays. Sundays were an extended torture in which work was absolutely forbidden, as reinforced by Mrs. Bateson, who had no difficulty keeping an eye on two toddlers - John protested he was not a toddler but in fact a very big boy - and two scientists eager to get back to their lab. Emmy thought she might scream with the torture of enduring Sundays. She spent as much time as she could writing to Raz and Ruth. Raz, of course, never replied; Ruth wrote back immediately, and sent a package of lead soldiers for the boys, ribbons for Mrs. Bateson, and Ruth’s own set of lock picks for Emmy.

Ruth probably thought she was being cute, making a joke on Emmy’s sense of confinement; she would expect them back in the next post. Emmy knew, as soon as she saw them, that she would not be writing back to Ruth that Sunday. She tucked them into her pocket, promised Mrs. Bateson she was going to take a walk, and stole away along the path Dr. Bateson took Tuesday mornings until she came to the big old barn that absolutely, definitively, in no way looked like a place to keep the top scientists of the nation.

Ruth had always been better at opening locks than Emmy had, because Ruth was the one who babysat local children who were always locking themselves into rooms and screaming to get back out. Ruth would have gotten the lock open before the redheaded technician came upon her and asked if he might help her find her way.

Emmy glared up at him. He wasn’t that redheaded; it was a dark red, and mostly covered by his uniform. They should know better than to put uniformed guards on an inconspicuous barn.

“I’m one of the scientists working on this project, and I am going to get inside this barn today,” she told him.

“Oh really?” he asked, confiscating her lock picks and trying to take her arm. “Then I’m sure you can prove it.”

Emmy shook him off and started explaining the advantages of mammals versus egg-layers and just why she thought all beasties should be grown in eggs regardless of the difficulties of manufacture and insemination.

“I’m not sure young ladies should know words like that,” said the guard.

“Insemination,” said Emmy spitefully. “Reproduction. Fertility cycle. _Mating_.”

That won a laugh out of him. “All right,” he said. “So why aren’t you allowed in?”

“I ought to be,” Emmy said, “so you ought to let me in.”

“Oh, I know better than that,” he said, looking a little wistful. “That’s more trouble than my job is worth.”

“Then let’s do it,” said Emmy, and she already knew she had won; this one liked a bit of challenge. He pulled the keys out of his pocket and unlocked the barn door.

“I do like a gentleman in uniform,” Emmy said as she stepped inside, lightly stressing the word _gentleman_. It was dark in the barn; the only light filtered down from the holes in the roof, if they really were holes.

They should do something about lighting for the airbag, she thought. Bioluminescence had been observed in many species; they could probably work it into the epidermis without much effort.

“There’s a step here,” said the guard, offering her his hand. “A whole staircase, actually.”

“Get more space by burrowing into the earth,” Emmy said approvingly, and took his offered arm. “What’s at the bottom?”

“Well, there’s a catwalk half way down, that’s where the really interesting stuff is,” said her guide. “You hear that humming?”

Emmy paused to listen. There was a rhythmic hum emanating from somewhere in the gloom, broken occasionally by a soft hiss or the sound of something moving in the darkness. It was all rather ominous, and she refused to be frightened.

“That’s the machinery. You can see it from the catwalk.”

“Isn’t that very… clanker?” Emmy asked. Her eyes were beginning to adjust, and she could just barely see the steps she was descending.

“Sometimes the best technology blends fabrications with clanker science,” he said.

“You’re not just a guard, then.”

“A technician,” he sighed. “Not good enough to actually work on anything, just to admire it from afar. I might get a position on the crew, if I play my cards right.”

He led her down the catwalk to where the humming grew to about the level of children’s voices from the next room over - a volume Emmy had recently had great opportunity to measure. The soldier assured her it wouldn’t grow any louder, since it was all in standby now. They were just testing it to see how it might be integrated with individual parts of an animal’s body so that when the final draft of the airbag was fabricated, they would be ready.

Emmy leaned over the railing and watched the pumps move up and down to the quiet hiss and puff of the resting machinery, trying to spot the interconnects between the mechanisms and the life they would attach to. It was particularly difficult in the gloom.

“Do I need to hold on to your belt?” her companion asked.

“Isn’t there any light in here?”

“Oh - we could risk something at the bottom. Come on,” he said, and Emmy reluctantly left her futile search for another trek down the stairs.

At the bottom, her guide disappeared for a moment to carefully connect a long pipe to a hose that led back to the pumps they had just been observing. The humming came softly toward them, quietening into a gentle whir. A moment later, soft blue-green light began to emanate from globes on the walls.

“The steam powers fans at the bottom of the globes,” her companion said, coming back to her. “They stir the water in the globes, and these little creatures -“

“Bioluminescent phytoplankton,” Emmy breathed, drifting closer.

“Yes, those,” he said sourly.

“I’d only ever read about them before,” Emmy said. “They’re -“ and she stopped, wondering if they could be modified to survive in a bloodstream.

“Yes, well, maybe you should take a look at what you came for,” he suggested. “We should head back up soon.”

“ _Already?_ ” Emmy asked, and hurried away from the globe she was looking at to run smack into a tank in the middle of the room. There was a shape floating in it; when she peered more closely, she could make out something like a lumpy jellyfish. She peered more closely at it and squeaked a little.

“It’s a _fetus!_ ” she announced. “Oh, I have to draw it.”

“You can’t,” he said, “we haven’t time.”

“But -“ said Emmy, looking longingly at it.

“Besides, there’s more of them down this way. You can’t draw all of them. I think they’re rather creepy.”

“More?” Emmy asked, and ran to the next tank to press her hands against it. This one looked more like a seahorse, and she drank in every detail. So they were fixating on sea creatures, probably assuming that the air could be treated as a very light liquid. That was good to know.

“Here now, don’t get fingerprints on it,” her companion said, and Emmy dug out a handkerchief and carefully wiped the glass. He rewarded her by saying, “They’ve been dying of malnutrition, mostly. The boffins keep saying things about getting more space inside.”

“I see,” said Emmy, not mentioning that this was precisely the problem she was working on - the one Bateson had been so very glad to get help with.

“We’d better go,” said her guide, and offered her his arm. Emmy tried very hard to let him keep it the whole way up the stairs, though she could have managed all of them herself.

“Thanks awfully for the tour,” she said at the top, one hand on the door of the barn.

“It was… a pleasure,” he said. “You remind me of my little brother.”

Emmy almost simply went through the door, but then ducked back quickly to say, “You’d better go back down and turn the lights off.” In the light from the door, she could see him blush.

“I’ll do that,” he said. “Don’t get caught on the way back, Miss…”

Emmy opened her mouth, then closed it again. Emmy was far too childish a name for a rising scientific prodigy .

“Nora,” she said instead.

“Nora. I’m Thomas Barlow. I imagine I’ll be seeing you around here again soon.”

“Very soon,” Emmy assured him, and went back into the sunlight so he could go turn the pumps off.

She very nearly skipped back home and did hum all the way through dinner, until she was lying in bed thinking about the little pickled moon she hadn’t quite gotten to see at the end of the hall, and how to feed a fetus that couldn’t store its own digestive system, and trying to imagine a half-clanker beastie moving through the air.

“Cilia,” she muttered as she fell asleep. “It’s got to have cilia.”

 


End file.
